Adolescence review: Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne Netflix drama could save lives

And their extraordinary four-part Netflix series undoubtedly has the capacity to do just that.

Graham, who also wrote the drama alongside Thorne, plays Eddie, a humble plumber whose life is upended when his 13-year-old son Jamie (Owen Cooper) is arrested for murdering a girl from his school.

The victim, Katie, was stabbed seven times in a car park, just a few feet away from a playground, and a short walk from their school.

She had lacerations to her chest, neck, thighs and arms.

It was a frenzied, deliberate attack.

But from the moment armed police burst into Jamie's bedroom in the show's opening minutes – it's a hell of an opening – he claims innocence. And naturally, you're inclined to believe him, because the culprit standing before us is a child.

When DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters) orders him to leave his bed, sheer panic is splashed across his face as he calls out for his dad. Jamie's tracksuit bottoms are damp. He's wet himself.

You want to take him in your arms and tell him that it's all a horrible misunderstanding.

Surely it's a case of mistaken identity, or the wrong address? Surely the police have made a monumental mistake?

But they haven't. Jamie killed Katie, and without hesitation, a moment which is captured in some chilling CCTV footage that knocks the wind right out of Eddie while his son is being questioned in a later scene.

In any other show, that would be considered a spoiler. But it very quickly becomes clear that this isn’t a mystery thriller, or even really a crime drama.

While a crime has been committed, Adolescence is more concerned with interrogating why young men and boys are killing women and girls.

The initial idea for the series came to Graham following a spate of similarly violent incidents up and down the country, from the fatal stabbing of 12-year-old Ava White in Liverpool city centre in 2021 to the murder of 15-year-old Elianne Andam in Croydon in 2023.

He initially shared his own concern and despair with director Philip Barantini (Boiling Point), with Thorne then later joining the project; and together, they have devised an incredibly powerful and poignant study of the devastating, sometimes fatal impact of toxic masculinity, and how boys and young men, in particular, are dangerously susceptible to the poison being peddled by snake oil salesmen like Andrew Tate and the 'manosphere', both of which get a mention.

As much as I'd like to ignore Tate and his ilk in the hope that they'll just disappear, we simply don't have that luxury because women and girls are being subjected to extreme acts of violence by children.

Name-checking undoubtedly feeds both Tate's ego and his pockets, but ignoring a problem of this magnitude only helps it to fester, as the Hunt family can attest to.

It was recently reported that the 28-year-old man who raped and murdered 25-year-old Louise Hunt with a crossbow last year after she ended their relationship had searched for Tate's podcast the day before.

He also killed her sister Hannah and their mum Carol.

The male ego or male fragility, whatever you want to call it, plays a central role in Adolescence.

Online, the Tates of the world – he's far from the only one – are controlling the narrative about what it means to be a man, a question the clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie's case (Erin Doherty) puts to him in episode 3, seven months on from Katie's murder.

Not yet old enough to be housed in a young offenders' institute, he's being remanded at a secure training centre ahead of his trial, where he's being assessed by several mental health professionals.

It's an extraordinary episode of television – largely a two-hander – in which the full extent of Jamie's rage is laid bare, something we haven't really witnessed from him before, which makes it all the more shocking.

But clearly, it was there, growing more noxious by the day as he immersed himself in an online world that often feels increasingly unknown and out of control – particularly to parents.

Yet there isn't much detail about his online activity. Certain things are shown briefly, or hinted at. But for viewers who don't really engage with social media, or who know very little about the online incel movement and the platforms where those voices congregate, more colour would have been useful.

It's difficult, impossible even, to fathom how a 13-year-old from a stable home could fall down the rabbit hole to such an extent that he's emboldened to commit a violent murder, and the writing could have done more to illustrate that.

But that detail, Jamie's background, is what makes Adolescence such an arresting and disturbing watch – and should set alarm bells ringing.

Jamie comes from a normal family. He has two loving parents. They live in a normal house on a normal residential street. They might look a lot like your family. You probably know countless families just like them. There is nothing unusual or disagreeable about the Millers. They are, in so many ways, an entirely normal family.

And yet. And yet.

"He never left his room," acknowledges Jamie's mum Manda (Christine Tremarco) in the final episode, which picks up with the Millers 13 months on from Katie's murder, just weeks before their son's court case.

"He'd come home, slam the door, straight up the stairs on the computer," she recalls.

How many parents can relate to that?

While Graham and Thorne don't have all of the answers, and they're not purporting to, what Adolescence does very well is it asks questions – do you know what your children are doing behind closed doors? What content they're accessing online? – and then leaves the audience to mull over their respective answers.

"One of our aims was to ask, 'What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?'" said Graham said in an interview with Tudum.

But the simple act of raising those questions could save young men, who are also victims in all of this, albeit in a different way to women and girls, from falling through the cracks.

It's hard to imagine any of this year's releases, on the big screen or the small, being as powerful and affecting a watch as Adolescence. It's a remarkable piece of television, in large part due to Barantini's masterful one-shot filming, which he employed in memorable restaurant thriller Boiling Point, and which works brilliantly here.

It gives the drama a relentless, real-time quality. At times, it feels like you're watching an access-all-areas documentary where the cameras have just been allowed to run and run. You feel like you're there with Jamie and Eddie and whoever's in a given scene.

It is uncomfortable and at times claustrophobic. There's no let-up; no room to breathe. It is an endurance test, in many ways, but one you won't be able to tear yourself away from.

Credit must also go to Graham, who is, as you'd expect, in his element as a dad who's had his heart ripped right out of his chest by his own flesh and blood. There's simply no one better equipped to inhabit this type of character and story, and the final scene, in particular, will shatter your own heart into a million pieces.

But it's Cooper's performance as young killer Jamie which steals the show. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a brilliant and mature display from someone so young, and in a drama as demanding as this. I've certainly never seen an actor so young hold his own against Graham, one of our finest. He is an exceptional talent who'll have no shortage of offers after this.

A string of high-calibre performances give all of the characters a lived in quality, as does Graham and Thorne's script, although the dialogue does feel a little scripted and contrived in places.

A conversation between the lead detectives during a visit to the school in episode 2, in which they discuss perpetrators always "getting the front line" while victims are often forgotten, feels like it was lifted from an impassioned op-ed.

There's also an encounter in a DIY store between Eddie and a member of staff which has a heightened, almost fabricated quality to it that isn't really in keeping with the grounded tone elsewhere.

We also don't see or hear from Katie's family, which is an interesting decision, and one that could be considered a glaring omission.

Read more:

• Adolescence star Stephen Graham breaks down what it's like filming high-pressure, one-shot thriller
• Ashley Walters planned to quit acting after Top Boy – but Adolescence changed his mind

But quibbles aside, Adolescence has already cemented itself as one of the year's most impressive shows, with many an award surely coming its way, and its importance cannot be overstated.

Graham and Thorne's drama should be mandatory viewing, particularly for boys and their parents; Adolescence should be added to the national curriculum without delay.

As ITV's landmark drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office demonstrated, television's power can be far-reaching and vast. While the issues explored in Adolescence are far more complex and knotty, there is every chance that this show could save lives.

Adolescence is available to stream now on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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